man can struggle only when supreme love as well as duty nerves his arm.
Neither he nor Reine Allix could see that a man's duty might lie from
home, but in that home both were alike ready to dare anything and to
suffer everything. It was a narrow form of patriotism, yet it had
nobleness, endurance, and patience in it; in song it has been oftentimes
deified as heroism, but in modern warfare it is punished as the blackest
crime.

So Bernadou tarried in his cottage till he should be called, keeping
watch by night over the safety of his village and by day doing all he
could to aid the deserted wives and mothers of the place by tilling
their ground for them and by tending such poor cattle as were left in
their desolate fields. He and Margot and Reine Allix, between them, fed
many mouths that would otherwise have been closed in death by famine,
and denied themselves all except the barest and most meagre subsistence,
that they might give away the little they possessed.

And all this while the war went on, but seemed far from them, so seldom
did any tidings of it pierce the seclusion in which they dwelt. By and
by, as the autumn went on, they learned a little more. Fugitives coming
to the smithy for a horse's shoe; women fleeing to their old village
homes from their light, gay life in the city; mandates from the
government of defence sent to every hamlet in the country; stray
news-sheets brought in by carriers or hawkers and hucksters,--all these
by degrees told them of the peril of their country,--vaguely, indeed,
and seldom truthfully, but so that by mutilated rumors they came at last
to know the awful facts of the fate of Sedan, the fall of the Empire,
the siege of Paris. It did not alter their daily lives: it was still too
far off and too impalpable. But a foreboding, a dread, an unspeakable
woe settled down on them. Already their lands and cattle had been